Hey everyone, welcome back! In our last couple weeks we’ve covered a bit about me, the designer, and the underlying themes being hit by the game. This week we’re going to focus a bit on my intentions with this blog and talk about a few topics. None of this is going to be set in stone, so I’d love to hear from people what they would like to hear about as we continue moving forward towards our eventual release date.
There are a number of topics I think would be legit to discuss, so let’s jump into the first set of potential posts. I’m planning, for now, to talk a bit about game design and my thoughts on how to make a really fantastic game. I’m by no means an expert, but I think in my 5 years of designing games I’ve learned quite a bit and the experiences I’ve had have really helped me learn how to create an exceptional piece of work. Big topics would include creating a solid theme, letting the player make decisions, creating depth in the game, and other such things.
The second set of potential topics include going deep into what went on making my first game, Pug Life. I’d talk about the playtests we’ve run (of which I have over 80 pages of notes in a google doc), the decisions I made, the issues we ran into, and why I settled on certain concepts. This would really give a behind the scenes view of what goes into making a good game and the legwork required to really understand how to take something that’s initially nothing special, but eventually turn it into something everyone can enjoy.
I think the third potential set would be a bit about creating the game itself, more on the broader side and less about specifics (like design decisions). We’d talk about funny stories that showed up while playing, errors made from certain versions, crazy plays that happened, history/stories about certain card names, and other things like that. This is similar to the second potential set, but is much less technical and more about the experience of making the game.
I haven’t really settled on any single one of these right now, but I’m curious what other people think. What do you want to hear me talk about? I love telling stories and have a lot of experience in design, so there is nothing I wouldn’t be happy to discuss. Let me know what you’d like to hear about in the comments!